Here's what is known about the deadly collision between a passenger jet and Army helicopter
A jet with 60 passengers and four crew members collided with an Army helicopter while approaching Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., sending the two aircraft plummeting into the Potomac River and killing everyone on board.
The collision occurred at around 9 p.m. Wednesday in one of the world's most tightly controlled airspaces, just over 3 miles (5 kilometers) south of the White House and U.S. Capitol. A search-and-rescue effort launched overnight turned into a recovery operation by mid-Thursday morning.
Here are some things to know about the collision:
The collision involved a regional jet out of Wichita, Kansas, that was preparing to land and a military helicopter that was on a training exercise, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
A few minutes before the jet was to land, air traffic controllers asked American Airlines Flight 5342 if it could do so on a shorter runway, and the pilots agreed. Controllers cleared the jet to land and flight tracking sites showed the plane adjust its approach to the new runway.
Less than 30 seconds before the collision, an air traffic controller asked a helicopter if it had the arriving plane in sight. The controller made another radio call to the helicopter moments later, saying “PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ" — apparently telling the copter to wait for the Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet to pass. There was no reply, and the aircraft collided seconds later.
The plane’s radio transponder stopped transmitting about 2,400 feet (732 meters) short of the runway, roughly over the middle of the Potomac. The body of the plane was found upside-down in three sections in waist-deep water, officials said.
The helicopter's wreckage was also found in the river.
NTSB officials said they were working to recover the data recording equipment from both aircraft.
Federal investigators will try to piece together the moments before the collision, including any communication between the two aircraft and air traffic controllers, as well as other actions of the pilots might have taken.
President Donald Trump, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Secretary of the Army nominee Daniel Driscoll all said it appeared that the crash could have been avoided.
At a White House news conference , Trump said the there were no survivors, that the cause of the collision wasn't clear, and that the miliary and National Transportation Safety Board were investigating. Without evidence, he blamed air traffic controllers, the helicopter pilots and Democratic policies at federal agencies.
“We’ll find out how this disaster occurred and will ensure that nothing like this ever happens again," he said.
Trump criticized diversity hiring efforts at the FAA, though when pressed about why, he acknowledged there was no evidence that those efforts could be blamed for the collision.
“It just could have been,” he said.
The collision was the deadliest U.S. air crash in nearly 24 years. At least 28 bodies have been pulled from the icy waters.
Among the passengers were members of the Skating Club of Boston who were returning from the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita. They included teenage figure skaters Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, the teens' mothers and two highly regarded Russian-born coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who won a 1994 world championship in pairs skating.
Other Russians were also on the jet, according to the Kremlin.
Skating Club of Boston CEO Doug Zeghibe said Thursday that a total of 14 of the crash victims were coming back from a national development camp for promising young skaters following the U.S. Championships.
Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff for Army aviation, said the helicopter crew was “very experienced” and familiar with the congested flying that occurs daily around Washington.
“Both pilots had flown this specific route before, at night. This wasn’t something new to either one of them,” he said.
All three soldiers' bodies were recovered.
Located along the Potomac just southwest of Washington, Reagan National is a popular choice because it’s much closer to the city than the larger Dulles International Airport. It reopened Thursday morning after all takeoffs and landings were halted.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a news conference that the night was clear and that prior to the collision, the plane and helicopter flight paths “were not unusual for what happens in the D.C. airspace."
“I would just say that everyone who flies in American skies expects that we fly safely," he said. "That when you depart an airport, you get to your destination. That didn’t happen last night, and I know that President Trump, his administration, the FAA, the DOT, we will not rest until we have answers for the families and for the flying public.”
The crash happened as federal authorities and aviation experts have expressed concerns about increasing close calls between planes. At Reagan National in May, an American Airlines plane rolling down the runway canceled its takeoff to avoid colliding with another plane landing on an intersecting runway — the second close call at the airport in six weeks.
The helicopter was a UH-60 Black Hawk based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, according to the Army.
The plane was a Canadian-made Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet and was manufactured in 2004. It can carry up to 70 passengers.
Fatal crashes of commercial aircraft in the U.S. are rare. The last major crash was in 2009 near Buffalo, New York. All 45 passengers and the four crew members were killed when the Bombardier DHC-8 propeller plane crashed into a house. One person on the ground was also killed.
In November 2001, an American Airlines flight crashed into a residential area of Belle Harbor, New York, just after takeoff from Kennedy Airport, killing all 260 people aboard.
The collision Wednesday recalled the crash of an Air Florida flight that plummeted into the Potomac on January 13, 1982, killing 78 people. That crash was attributed to bad weather.
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Associated Press reporters from throughout the U.S. contributed.
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